SAN JOSE, Costa Rica — Roberto Fionna, a discreet and wealthy Argentine, owned the best Italian restaurant in town and, according to investigators, had the most influential friends money could buy.
His arrest and extradition to France on heroin trafficking charges last year set off a national inquiry that has shaken Costa Rica's political establishment.
After public hearings into Fionna's web of protection, three high court magistrates, an ambassador and the chief criminal investigator of the judicial police agency have resigned, and a prominent lawmaker is under pressure to quit as well.
The scandal, which has riveted national attention, reflects the vulnerability of Central America's most open and peaceful society to drug dealers seeking either refuge for themselves or new routes for Colombian cocaine to the United States.
Yet in a country with no army and not enough radar to track every aircraft, the continuing investigation by a Legislative Assembly panel seems to show the strength of Costa Rican democratic institutions in fighting corruption by the drug barons.
President Oscar Arias Sanchez, who was awarded the 1987 Nobel Peace Prize for trying to stop guerrilla conflicts in Central America, has put a high priority on stopping drugs. At his initiative, the Legislative Assembly last May enacted what U.S. officials call the toughest anti-narcotics law in Latin America.
In a televised address, Arias warned that "precarious political situations" in Panama and in Central America have "induced international rogues to try and test our stability and our respect for the law with their contemptible operations."
With its lax immigration laws, unpatrolled coastlines and a multitude of private airstrips, Costa Rica became a major way-station for U.S.-bound Colombian cocaine in the mid-1980s, police officials say. This followed successful efforts to reduce cocaine shipments through the Bahamas.
From 1980 to 1984, Costa Rican police captured an average of one kilogram (2.2 pounds) of cocaine a year, according to Carlos Saurez of the Public Security Ministry. Without a major increase in police power, he said, total cocaine seizures since 1985 have soared to 3,000 kilograms.
Hernan Vargas, a narcotics specialist on the judicial police force, estimates that 1,500 kilograms of cocaine pass through the country every month, typically entering in small aircraft and leaving by sea in legally registered containers of shrimp, pineapple and other perishables.
